Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Proposed NSF Budget

The president sent out his proposed budget for FY08 (starting October
1, 2007). The NSF in general and CS in particular do quite well. The
CRA Blog has the details
but for the tree we care about:

The NSF received a 6.8% increase over the FY07 request.

Research and Related Activities: 7.7%.

Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE): 9.0%.

Computing and Communication Foundation (CCF): A whopping 21.4%.

CCF is where the Theoretical Foundations cluster sits which includes
Theory of Computing.

Also NSF would have a new agency wide program on Cyber-Enabled
Discover and Innovation (CDI) to "Broaden the Nation's
capability for innovation by developing a new generation of
computationally based discovery concepts and tools to deal with
complex, data-rich, and interacting systems."

The big caveat: The budget has to survive the congressional
appropriation process.

The NIH budget doubled in the 5 years from $13.6B in 1998 to $27.2B in 2003. It now stands at $28.6B, having been basically flat for the last 3 years. In constant dollars, even with the recent decline, current NIH funding is 200% of its 1995 amount.

By contrast, even with the proposed increases, NSF, whose budget is less than 1/4 that of NIH, is funded at just under 150% of its 1995 levels.

The 6.8% boost for NSF costs less than a 1.5% boost would for NIH, which everyone would think of as basically flat and therefore would have little political value. Moreover, the NSF budget is growing in part to accommodate items of value that have been squeezed out of DARPA funding.